Stellar Blade launched to favorable critic reviews when it dropped last week. In our review, ComicBook said it "boasts some surprisingly involved combat systems and fantastic creature designs all in a relatively compact experience" and gave Shift Up's action-adventure game four out of five stars. Even with critic reviews being largely positive, the fan scores are coming in even higher. In fact, Stellar Blade recently hit a user score rating on Metacritic that puts it above every PlayStation 5 game that's come before it. That's high praise for developer Shift Up.

As of this writing, Stellar Blade's Metacritic user score is sitting at 9.2 for the PlayStation 5 version of the game. At one point, its score crept up to 9.3, but it's come down slightly. That said, it's still among the highest user scores a PS5 game has received to date, putting it ahead of hit games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Marvel's Spider-Man 2. It's also worth noting that Stellar Blade's current user score marks it as the highest-rated game by players of 2024 across all platforms. Of course, the year is still young, but it's quite the achievement for Shift Up.

That all being said, it's sometimes hard to know how much stake to put into user scores. After all, these are largely anonymous and often subject to brigading. However, that issue often works the other way, as players will hammer a game with poor scores in an attempt to "review bomb" a game they don't like. Stellar Blade might be getting the opposite treatment from players championing the game following some of the controversy around censorship. Either way, it's clear that players love Stellar Blade, which is all any developer can ask for.

What's Next for Shift Up
With Stellar Blade under its belt, Shift Up is ready to move on to new projects. The team will continue to provide support for their recent release and likely drop a few patches over the next few weeks and months, but Shift Up has already started to staff up for whatever's coming next.

Early last month, listings were spotted on Shift Up's website (thanks to GamingBolt) confirming that the team is hiring for its next project. The listings confirm that the studio's next title will be an action RPG in an urban sci-fi setting. Shift Up's next game will also be a multiplatform release, with the listings mentioning PC and consoles. Unfortunately, no specific consoles are mentioned, but it'll likely be PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S at the very least

Stellar Blade is available now on PlayStation 5.

Posted: May 06, 2024 8:27 pm
Related Forum: PlayStation Forum

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/stellar-blade-highest-metacritic-user-score-ps5/